Welcome to 5 Quick Things that I saw since last month that I thought were interesting enough to share with you. None of them are particularly timely so feel free to just enjoy 🙂

This time it’s the proper November update 🙂

>Number One<

The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness

This article is really interesting and through. In some ways there is a uniqueness of the loneliness felt inside of the (especially) male gay communities in the US but reading this during a ton of lockdown and isolation really hit me in my feelings a little also. There’s quite a lot that isn’t unpacked about the “gay experience” I supposed but the lost history and the inability of communities to be built around anything but shared trauma and unhealthy coping mechanisms is certainly something that leaves an impact.

>Number Two<

Fruit IP

While I can stand on my high ground and pretend that Europe is a great place that doesn’t have these same problems, as the article points out things like intellectual property of organic material is something that is starting to cross borders and go international. When reading this article I couldn’t stop thinking about two particular things. The first, is that I met a man in Portland, OR who goes across the country looking for heritage apples which have been forgotten or neglected by modern business and how things like that could affect his work and in general the preservation of a variety of species of fruit. The second thing was that there are so many patent trolls who buy up IPs and then sue people for them, mostly in the tech industry but even that has intense repercussions…I don’t really want to know what the implications of that are if it moves into the food system. So that’s your horrifying thought for the day, you’re welcome.

>Number Three<

A Comet Returns

This video from the litcritguy is really a great look into what it means when we classify different groups of people. Since most of the world is experiencing an uptick in “riots” I think something like this is quite a powerful video about both why people come together in large groups and how and why they wield power for change. I’m also a huge fan of one of the articles that is cited in the video which I guess means this is a bonus thing but I just keep coming back to the quote:

Nobody thinks they will end racism by burning a cop car. But people are changed by the experience of revolt. Listen to what they say. They are fed up and fighting back. They are experimenting with their own powers, their creative capabilities to fight the reality that threatens them. These existential, cultural, psychic, historic, and political experiences are not nothing. They may end up being everything in the long run.

>Number Four<

Human Sexuality, for Everyone

We had HBO in my house and I wasn’t super great at sleeping so I’d often be watching HBO light at night as a child and I remember seeing a program called “Real Sex”. Well, it stuck with me well into adulthood but it seemed so strange and outlandish that I’d actually thought I’d dreamt it up as a kid so when I bumped into this article about the show and its legacy and contribution to normalizing many parts of the human sexual experience I knew I wanted to share it. Hats off to this great show and a few other things I probably shouldn’t have watched a child!

>Number Five<

Dewey Decimal System for Folklore

Do you like classification systems? Do you like fairy tales and folk lore? Do you like when those two things get mixed together? I never thought about how to divide up the different types of human stories, characters, myths, and lores that have been passed around from culture to culture but thankfully other people have. Multiple version of folk lore indexing are made easily accessible on this website that I spent way too much time exploring. I’m not sure if I’ll ever need this personally but it is very interesting on its own.

Alright folks, that’s it for this month, see you next month!